May 23, 2016
Dr. Adam Knox, the eponymous narrator of this propulsive, intrigue-filled thriller from Shamus Award–winner Spiegelman (Thick as Thieves), runs a health clinic near Los Angeles, treating addicts, transients, prostitutes, and other disenfranchised patients. To help fund his humanitarian efforts, Knox does discreet after-hours home visits for celebrities and criminals, who pay well for Knox’s silence. When a battered, terrified young Romanian woman brings in a very sick boy and then vanishes, Knox is left with a difficult choice: should he contact Child Protection Services, or try to track the boy’s mother down on his own? A group of Russian thugs soon shows up demanding the child, and Knox finds himself in way over his head. With the help of his friend Ben Sutter, a former Special Forces operator, Knox investigates and becomes entangled in a seedy underworld of human traffickers and Russian mobsters. Spiegelman expertly doles out the suspense, while leaving his protagonist with some difficult moral choices of his own. Author tour. Agent: Denise Marcil, Denise Marcil Literary Agency, LLC.
May 15, 2016
A well-intentioned doctor working with prostitutes and junkies in the seedier parts of Los Angeles can get himself into big trouble. So learns the hero of Spiegelman's (Thick As Thieves, 2011, etc.) noir thriller as his noble aims make him the target of Russian terrorists and shady American business moguls. Dr. Adam Knox runs a clinic in a neighborhood he calls "Skid Row-adjacent." By night he cruises some even dodgier parts of town with a friend, former Special Forces agent Ben Sutter; together they perform medicine for money on junkies and gang-war casualties. Visiting the clinic one day is Elena, a prostitute bearing some alarming bruises. She leaves Knox to guard her young son, Alex, makes a quick trip to the bathroom, and disappears. Once Russian thugs start appearing at his door, Knox realizes it won't be an easy path to reunite mother and child. The trail leads him first to Hoover Mays, a guilty-looking executive who sports bruises similar to Elena's. But he faces a bigger threat in Harris Bray, a billionaire who runs a Koch-like empire of oil refineries and conservative think tanks. With numerous human rights violations to his credit, Bray has his own reasons for seeking Elena and for making sure Knox doesn't find her first. The plot complications get more outlandish as they go, but the dark urban atmosphere keeps the book grounded in gritty reality.
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Starred review from May 1, 2016
Spiegelman doesn't publish nearly as much as most crime-fiction authors (only five books since 2003, but when he does, it's usually a jewel. And that's especially true of his latest, which, by all indications, is the first in a series (Hallelujah for that!). Dr. Adam Knox, formerly a doctor without borders in Africa, now runs a clinic in L.A.'s skid row, but to make ends meet, he also makes off-the-grid house calls (cash only) to patients in need of emergency services without the attention of press or police (your overdosed rock stars, your shot-up gangbangers). His friend from Africa, Ben Sutter, former special-forces operator, finds the clients for these extracurricular ventures and generally serves as Dr. Knox's backup in times of crisis (Sutter is Hawk to Knox's Spenser). And there's plenty of backup needed this time, all stemming from a possibly rash act of compassiontaking in a young boy abandoned at the clinic. Knox hopes to find the child's vanished mother before losing him to the city's child-services system, but, soon enough, unfeeling bureaucrats are the least of the problem: various gangsters and ruthless business moguls are also desperate to find both boy and mother. It's a great setup, and Spiegelman twists his way through the plot like a punt returner weaving through traffic, but, beyond that, his ability to burst his characters into throbbing life in a few short paragraphscombined with a prose style capable of snapping our heads with a staccato succession of perfectly landed prose jabswill leave readers rubbing their jaws in wonderment. Please, Dr. Knox, make more house calls soon.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)